Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB NVMe SSD review - Go big or go home

With many modern games coming in at around 100-150GB installed these days, and large-capacity SSDs dropping in price massively over the past year, it has never been a better time to think about migrating exclusively to SSD storage.

Whilst the selection of internal SSDs above 4TB is quite low still, Sabrent's 8TB Rocket 4 Plus offers well-rounded specs, and performance to match.

Back in February, I reviewed Sabrent's gaming SSD, the Rocket 4 Plus-G 2TB, and not long after, Sabrent offered a look at their 8TB model in the Rocket 4 Plus range.

The missing "G" might make you think that this 8TB monster may not be geared for gaming since there is no mention of any optimisation for DirectStorage, or gaming advantages, but don't let paper specs fool you.

Those with extremely large gaming libraries should be more than happy as time goes on and newer titles leverage the bandwidth that NVMe SSDs in general are capable of, with or without gaming technologies like DirectStorage.

As the Rocket 4 Plus 8TB and Rocket 4 Plus-G 2TB are both PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, come from the same model family and share the same Phison E18 controller, this review will supplement the Plus-G review, and shed light on any key differences between both drives.

Specifications

Performance testing

I opted to long-term test the 8TB Rocket 4 Plus as an active workload and storage drive for a couple of months, focusing not only on game installs but also media and my Lightroom catalog, which currently sits at 2.35TB in size.

This will no doubt be a similar use-case scenario for the majority of people looking for a fast and reliable 8TB NVMe SSD in builds where a smaller capacity SSD is the primary OS drive, leaving a large capacity drive for everything else.

All testing was conducted on the following build:

• CPU: Intel i7 -12700KF
• Motherboard: Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X
• RAM: 64GB DDR 4-3600
• Primary OS SSD: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G 2TB
• Backup SSD: Samsung 870 QVO 8TB
• GPU: Zotac RTX 4090
• OS: Windows 11 Pro build 22H2

The drive was installed in the secondary bank of 3x M.2 slots on the motherboard which is covered by a large panel heatsink. This sits directly behind --and is completely blocked by-- the RTX 4090, so heat soak is expected since no airflow gets to such a tight space given the size of a 4090 cooler as shown below.

It is worth pointing out that on an Intel platform such as Z690/Z790, the M.2 slots that run off the chipset, not the CPU (the slot closest to the CPU), will share PCIe lanes with both GPU and SATA depending on how many SATA drives you have connected.

On my Z690 board I am using the Samsung 8TBS ATA drive via USB 3.2 Gen 2 for this reason, as using a any of the lower bank of SATA ports disables those ports as the lower M.2 slots being used takes the priority. On other boards such as Z790, this may well be different and you find yourself witth half the PCIe lanes that you would otherwise have, if connecting SATA drives in conjunction with the lower M.2 slots being occupied.

If you are not sure what speed your drives are running at with everything connected, then simply checking the BIOS/UEFI under the drive details pages should show information on the speed/lanes utilised. If some drives are not detected at all, then you may need to change the SATA or M.2 slot you've got a drive plugged into so the chipset can allocate the correct resources.

This is all assuming PCIe Gen 4 SSDs are being used. If you have a Z790 board and use a Gen 5 SSD, then you may lose functionality of PCIe slots entirely. To be safe, it is best to check the user manual for your particular board to see what slots can and cant be used in combination, as you may not atually be getting the full potential of your new NVMe SSD if these quirks are not looked into.

Spot the 8TB SSD...

Yet even so, sustained performance consistency was very good in multiple runs of the benchmarks below, as well as in heavy workload usage.

I was impressed to see that the read speed kept up with the 2TB Rocket 4 Plus-G. Doing multiple runs, both read and write speeds remained consistent overall.

The sustained write speed, however, wasn't quite matching the specified 6000MB/s, although typically this is expected behavior, especially at this storage density, which is why manufacturers tend to note an "up to xxxxMB/s" figure when stating both read and write speeds.

The Random 4K Q1T1 read speed is much lower than the 2TB Plus-G. This is likely due to the sheer density of the flash storage, and since this test revolves around writing lots of smaller files, the write speed is slower the more tightly packed the flash chips get on higher-capacity SSDs.

For comparison, the 2TB Rocket 4 Plus-G and 2TB Samsung 990 Pro both get 86MB/s and 87MB/s respectively, with 92MB/s being the highest I have seen on the Sabrent 2TB.

Loading up the DirectStorage 1.1 BulkLoadDemo was also interesting. The DirectStorage optimised 2TB Rocket Plus-G achieved 15.5GB/s throughput on the same system as noted in the previous review, so for the 8TB Rocket Plus to reach 14.11GB/s without having a DirectStorage optimised firmware is quite impressive. Although not too unexpected, given that both SSDs share the same direct bloodline.

What this highlights most of all if the 2TB Plus-G's review wasn't enough to go by, is that you don't need a top-of-the-line DirectStorage optimised SSD to leverage this sort of technology. Besides, we still don't have any DirectStorage 1.1 games on the market to properly compare with. Although a modern game like Dead Space remake, which has a recommended requirement of a PCIe SSD, loads just as fast on the 8TB Rocket Plus as it does on any other PCIe Gen 3 or 4 SSD that I have tested so far, regardless of capacity.

Day-to-day use

As mentioned, I have been storing my Lightroom Catalog RAW photos on the drive, along with all of my working documents and backups which ended up seeing 3.27TB free of the 7.27TB total space available once formatted. On a weekly basis, I run a number of backup tasks from the primary SSD, as well as archive the Lightroom working catalog after a batch of photos has been worked on.

Moving large single files between drives is also quick, and whilst benchmark tools show the raw bandwidth potential the drive is capable of, a more real-world result is seen by just moving large files around manually, as you would do in day-to-day use.

I did not run into any issues with cache buffer throttling, which is a problem I sometimes face on the Samsung 870 8TB SATA SSD, which has QLC NAND flash.

FreeFileSync (backup & file transfers)

Even though the benchmarks earlier pegged the write speed between 5GB/s and 5.3GB/s depending on the application, Windows Explorer and file backup tools such as FreeFileSync show the real-world performance being lower when the overheads of the operating system and other factors are considered.

Though having said that, 3.2GB/s is still plenty fast, as the screenshot above demonstrates. The exact same result was seen just by dragging and dropping the same file using Windows File Explorer, but I did observe a repeatable random pause halfway through when using Explorer.

This appears to be due to the heavy-handed nature of Windows Defender scanning the file being transferred resulting in a 5-7 second pause before it then resumes.

I did not encounter any heat-related speed throttling problems, something that I did observe with past Samsung SSDs. The average temperature range seemed to stay around 50-56°C during heavy use and benchmarking, which is well within its rated operating temperature and won't start throttling until 70-75°C according to Sabrent.

Conclusion

Once again, I am impressed by another Sabrent SSD. This and the 2TB Plus-G have been my first hands-on experiences with the brand, and I have to say that I am more than pleased with the performance and reliability (so far) of both drives.

The folks at Sabrent have also been upfront and transparent with me in relation to technical questions and general discussions surrounding not only their drives but SSDs as a whole. This resonates with me at a personal level, as good customer service is what I look for when looking at upgrading to high-value components.

Knowing that I can rely on both the company and product in this way gives me increased confidence in future purchases, too.

As this has been a long-term test spanning a good few months, it has allowed me to see how much prices have fallen since the drive landed on my doorstep.

Amazon price tracking

At the time of writing, the drive can be bought for around $1000/£1050. This is a big price drop from even a few months ago where it was at least £1400 here in the UK leading up to the new year.

An 8TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD capable of this level of consistent performance, and with the positive track record of Sabrent does appear to be a strong value for money for those looking for a high-performance SSD in this class. Although it cannot be denied that even with price drops for SSDs across the board, $/£1000 is a serious chunk of cash to spend on a single drive, especially in today's world where we all have to watch where we spend our money.

My only gripe is that the Sabrent Control Panel application has not seen a facelift yet, just as I mentioned in the last review. It looks like something that was created over a decade ago and its usability/features appear constrained when compared with Samsung's Magician, or Western Digital's Dashboard utilities. Sabrent have confirmed to us that a new version is in the works, but a definitive release date is unknown. Watch this space.

I also had trouble getting the custom version of Acronis to successfully clone an OS SSD to either Sabrent drive for use as a boot drive. I had to resort to using Macrium Reflect, which worked perfectly.

This is worth noting for those who might be looking to replace their OS drive and have just a single 8TB for everything.

There are other 8TB NVMe drives out there, too, but anything considerably cheaper will be using slower QLC flash storage. Corsair's MP600 8TB springs to mind, which also comes similarly specced, warrantied and priced, and there are others, too. So your choice may well boil down to brand loyalty and/or software features in this segment. Sabrent confirmed to us that they were first to release drives of this category after commissioning Phison to develop the drives with a 1 year exclusive lead. Keep in mind also that Puget Systems recently switched to Sabrent drives for their professional workstations over Samsung.

Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus 8TB is a compelling SSD with specs and performance that sit nicely alongside its gaming-orientated and smaller capacity equivalents. Just keep in mind that the 5 years of warranty are only unlocked after you register a new SSD on Sabrent's website.

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